Birth of Karoline von Brandenburg-Ansbach
in Ansbach, Germany. Caroline was the wife of the second of
the German Kings of England, George II. She was a very strong
influence on her husband's execution of his kingly duties,
perhaps most visibly in her strong support of the prime
minister, Robert Walpole.

March 1, 1701

Birth of Johann Breitinger in Zürich,
Switzerland. Breitinger, a theologian by training and a
teacher of classic languages, emerged as the most important
literary critic of the 18th century. His most significant
work was Kritische Dichtkunst (1740). He opposed the
rationalist critical theories of Gottsched of Leipzig, the
other great critical force of the times. Breitinger worked
closely with Johann Bodmer, another prominent Swiss critic.

March 1, 1858

Birth of Georg Simmel in Berlin, Germany.
Simmel, a sociologist and philosopher, is noted for his
contributions to the methods of sociology. He was a professor
at the universities of Berlin and Strassburg. He did much on
the sociology of authority and submission as well as the
depersonalization effects of money (Philosophie des
Geldes, 1900).

March 1, 1886

Birth of the Expressionist painter and
writer, Oskar Kokoschka, in Pöchlarn, Austria.
Representative paintings by Kokoschka include "Mörder
Hoffnung der Frauen" (1907), "The Tempest"
(1914), Prague, Charles Bridge (1934), "The Red
Egg" (1941), and "View of Hamburg Harbor"
(1951). Kokoschka spend WWII in England. His art had been
declared degenerate by the Nazis.

March 1, 1913

Birth of Helmut Gernsheim (1913-1995) in Munich,
Germany. Gernsheim was one of the initiators of photography
as a serious form of art worthy of study and as an academic
discipline. After his study of art history at the University
of Munich, he immigrated to England and spent much of his
professional career in London. His book which documented
photography as a serious art form was The History of
Photography from the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in
the Eleventh Century up to 1914 (1955).

March 1, 1917

President Wilson gives a letter to the
press from the German minister, Arthur Zimmermann, who had
sent it through the German ambassador in Washington to the
German ambassador in Mexico offering Mexico an alliance
against the United States. He proposed that Mexico would be
assisted in retaking Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The
telegram was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence
and given to President Woodrow Wilson. The telegram became
instrumental in forming American public opinion against
Germany and for entering the war as Wilson gave it to the
press. America entered the war five weeks later.

March 1, 1939

Death of Ferdinand von Lindemann in Munich,
Germany. Lindemann was a mathematician who proved that the
classic Greek problem of squaring a circle by compass and
straightedge is insoluble for, as he showed, the number
"pi" is transcendental. He published his results in
the article "Über die Zahl pi".

March 1, 1948

The "Bank Deutscher Länder" is
founded in Frankfurt am Main. This bank would become the
Bundesbank, the Central Bank of the Federal Republic of
Germany.

March 1, 1979

The German Constitutional Court upholds the
Codetermination Law of 1976. (Worker participation in
corporate decision making.)

March 1, 1995

Death of Georges Köhler in Feiburg,
Germany. Köhler won the Nobel Prize for Physiology of
Medicine in 1984 for his work leading to the production of
monoclonal antibodies. This has great importance for the
treatment of diseases of the immune system including some
cancer and AIDS. Köhler did his work at Cambridge and Basel.
In 1985 he was appointed a director of the Max Planck
Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg.